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Dec. 14, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:56
11 Nagging the State

Nagging the state is like wagging your finger at the mafia. Here's a better approach.

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Well, hi there, it's Stephan Molyneux on, I don't know, my fifth or sixth extemporaneous podcast.
I had originally called these traffic jams because I was going to be doing them in my car, but now I've got a little bit of time.
I'm sitting in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., having just finished a presentation to a client, or a potential client, and now I have about an hour before I have to amble down to a conference where I'm giving a presentation as well.
to a group of people, so I thought I would throw down some thoughts, because I was reading the paper, and the paper always generates thoughts.
Now, it doesn't generate the same kind of thoughts that it used to for me.
I mean, I used to read the paper.
Maybe you experienced this as well.
I used to read the paper, and I used to get irritable.
I used to read the articles about, you know, this expansion of government power and that load of propaganda and that load of falsehood and, you know, like now the Pentagon is spending $300 million to put propaganda out around the world, you know, to write news articles which doubtless will be published as objective journalism and so on.
And, you know, they're looking to renew the Patriot Act with all of its horrendous invasive procedures and legalities.
And I used to just feel like I was, you know, standing in front of a tidal wave that was coming in and I, you know, there was no way to push it back and I was going to get swept away in this and that and the other.
But, you know, I mean, I sort of changed my mind or changed my heart about that process of reading things in the media that are just so blatantly false and ridiculous and destructive, you know, and all of this stuff being presented as a great either a great leap forward or something where you can send an email or nag the government and get it to do something better.
I don't feel that way so much anymore.
I actually, rightly or wrongly, I find it a little bit more funny now than I used to.
And, you know, evil is, in its essence, kind of ridiculous.
I mean, it has a goofiness to it because it is so earnest and so full of falsehood and, you know, this idea that, you know, well, for instance, gee, these terrorists just came and struck us out of nowhere and, you know, we have to defend the American people and so on.
I mean, it's all just so ridiculously transparent and so ridiculously easy to counter that it's very hard to take this kind of stuff seriously.
And I know that it results in death, and I know that it results in theft and Abu Ghraib and all this kind of stuff.
And so its manifestations in the real world are obviously horrifying, but the claims that evil people make to justify their actions are just so blatantly ridiculous that I find it very hard to take that stuff seriously.
I really hate the expansion of state power, but I do find quite ridiculous the claims to legitimacy or the moral claims that people who want to expand or support the expansion of that state power make.
It's just so foolish and illogical that I find it ridiculous and almost funny.
I mean, one sort of particular example that occurs to me from time to time.
is the idea that, well, you know, the government needs to protect American lives from people who wish to do it harm who live in foreign countries, right?
So, you know, fair enough.
Well, that's a particular principle, and of course it's a pretty transparent principle.
You know, if the principle is foreign governments should not harm domestic citizens, which, you know, seems to be a fairly interesting theory.
I mean, for somebody who doesn't believe in the moral validity of the state, it's all kind of silly, but let's just say for a moment it can be justified.
So somebody says, gee, the principle is that governments should protect their citizens from foreign government harm, or harm caused by foreign governments.
Fine, okay, well you can't just say that that's for America, or that's for Britain, or that's for Bahrain, or whatever.
You have to sort of say that as a principle, and I think that's all fine and dandy.
Then, of course, the question then becomes, If a legitimate role of government is to protect its citizens from harmful actions of foreign governments, then of course the U.S.
and Britain and these countries stand far more condemned than, say, Iraq.
Any moral justification that is used to support the war in Iraq Can of course easily and simply be turned against certain aspects and actions of the US government, right?
You know, ten years of bombing raids, you know, these numbers that are thrown around like 300,000 or 250,000 Iraqi children dead.
You know, the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been given to the Saudi government in arms and direct loans and subsidies.
All of that, you know, of course the Saudi government is a completely medieval and brutal theocratic dictatorship where, you know, they regularly chop off tens of thousands of limbs You know, if anybody dares to strike back at the government that is grinding them down.
So, you know, the amount of support that the U.S.
gives to these dictatorial governments is extraordinary.
And, of course, that support directly leads to the oppression, death, murder, mutilation, imprisonment, kidnapping, and all the other stuff that goes on for the citizens of these dictatorships.
So those people who are in those foreign countries are taking the U.S.
position and applying it to their own lives.
In other words, my government, or if my government won't or is in collusion with a foreign government that is doing us harm, either my government or myself or my group of friends have the right to act against foreign governments that are causing us harm.
So that's the rationale, of course, behind the war in Iraq.
To a large degree, that's how it was sold.
Then, you know, it's very easy to take that argument and turn it around and say, well, if it's justified for us to invade Iraq, then it was justified for any other country to invade ours.
And if the principle is then even more generalized to say that a human being has the right to act against another human being that is imposing violence upon him, Then, you know, the last thing we should be worrying about is Saddam Hussein, who I don't recall ever being able to tax me, or you, or, you know, subject us to regulations and, you know, get us into debt and so on.
You know, by far, they're the most dangerous.
People are our local police and politicians, so...
That's what I mean when I say I find that the effects of evil are horrifying, but the justifications for evil are just so silly that it is ridiculous to imagine that anybody could take it with any particular kind of seriousness.
The second thing that I find interesting or funny about reading the newspaper is, I don't know, you can call them the government nags, or the state finger-waggers, or whatever, but it's the people who write columns saying, well, the government shouldn't do this, the government should do that, or the government should do something else than what it's currently doing, or the government should protect the borders more, or the government should crack down on drugs, or the government should legalize drugs, or the government should do this, that, or the other.
I mean, that I find almost the most ridiculous of all the things that I read in the newspaper.
The idea that a sort of massive empire of force, which, you know, is the most successful criminal organization in the world, which is, you know, the centralized political state, that has access to weapons of mass destruction, that has access to, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to kill on its behalf.
The idea that this unbelievably enormous mammoth and violent leviathan of power is going to listen to a newspaper columnist and change its ways to its own detriment.
I mean, I just find that I just find that enormously ridiculous.
You know, you don't see a lot of newspaper articles where they say to the Mafia, you know, the Mafia should really stop killing people.
The Mafia should really stop, you know, selling quote protection to, you know, shop owners.
The Mafia should do this or the Mafia should do that.
Because it would be a patently ridiculous thing to do.
The whole point of the Mafia is to, you know, to steal, to rob, to kill, to threaten, to blackmail, to whatever.
I mean, that's what the organization does.
And so the idea that, you know, the government should reform the tax code, or, you know, the government should not repeal the Patriot Act, or the government should, you know, change its standards of immigration, or, I mean, I just find that stuff so silly, it's so ridiculous to attempt to lecture A massive quasi-criminal organization on how it should better behave.
It is, I think, not only funny, but of course, like all of these kinds of corruptions, particularly a dangerous thing.
Because if you approach the government as if it is an erring friend, Or an erring friend that can be reformed through, you know, wouldn't it be nicer if you did X?
What you're doing is you're cloaking a kind of legitimacy over it, right?
I mean, the only particularly morally valid approach to the government is to say that human beings should not use violence, and therefore, any time that you use violence, you are immoral.
I mean, that would be, to me, a pretty logical rule to bring to bear on things like the police and the military and so on.
To bring to bear, though, the idea that, OK, well, you can have all of this capacity for violence.
You can have weapons of mass destruction.
You can threaten, you know, your citizens' lives with force if they don't hand over their money.
You can run everything into debt.
You can provoke foreign wars.
You can support despotic governments.
You have covert operations in foreign countries.
You can have all of this incredibly vile criminal and evil power, but, you know, it'd be kind of nice if you did the border thing a little more gently, or if, you know, you maybe thought about legalizing marijuana, or, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
It's just kind of nonsense, and, you know, as my wife would doubtless say, my wife, the psychologist, would doubtless say, it's the same mess that people get into with their parents, right?
I mean, you see people who have mean abusive or alcoholic or destructive or violent or whatever parents and you know they'll sit down with them in stage interventions and say I'd like it if X or I'd like it if Y or they'll sit there and complain and say I can't believe this person my parent did this or that you know which is also complete nonsense this happens with siblings as well by the way But I mean, that's also complete nonsense.
I mean, if somebody has shown themselves to be emotionally abusive or violent or addicted to alcohol or drugs or whatever, unpleasant to deal with and problematic, then they're not going to change.
I mean, they're absolutely not going to change, certainly not if they've done it to their children.
So I guess it's the same problem.
between our relationship with our parents and our relationships with the state.
And that's something that my wife has really helped me to understand, because whenever I talk about the government, she says, well, you know, what are people's first experience of authority?
It tends to be their parents or their teachers and so on, who tend to be, you know, a little on the aggressive side or a little on the bullying side and so on.
And so people get their idea of the government from their parents and from their teachers, which I mean, of course, I mean, my wife said it, so I believe that it's right and it's true.
But I find that aspect of reading the newspaper just quite funny as well.
And the letters to the editor can literally be hysterical.
Letters to the editor are just fantastic, because they display such an enormous blindness to the realities of political power that you really would assume that they had been written by pod people who had just emerged from the 17th or 18th century, or by space aliens whose craft landed from some libertarian galaxy far away.
They simply assumed that the state was just some other sort of institution.
You know, like in Canada, they're looking at banning guns now, of course.
Not from the police and the military, because, you know, the police and the military need the guns to protect themselves against dangerous people, but, of course, the citizens don't.
And, of course, you know, people are saying, well, you know, the gun rates is this, and, you know, it'd be nice if they look how badly they did on this gun registry where they spent two billion dollars harassing gun owners.
And it got nowhere, or, you know, one guy is saying, well, what would it do to ban my gun?
I mean, I already have to keep it locked up.
I already have to have a safety on it.
I already have to transport in a locked case in the trunk of my car, which is also locked.
I have to do this, that, and the other.
So, you know, what would it matter to ban my gun?
I can't use it in any legitimate way anyway.
I mean, I certainly can't use it for self-defense.
Because, you know, it has to be locked in the basement with a gun lock on it and a safety lock on it.
I mean, the idea of fumbling for all of that when a home evasion is going on is kind of foolish.
But people, of course, will always just argue these specifics and, you know, that is pretty funny.
For me, that's like throwing a javelin at a tidal wave and thinking that you're going to do some damage.
I mean, it's absolutely foolish.
You know, there's absolutely no way to oppose violence except by calling it by its proper name.
You know, the government should never have the right to limit firearms.
I mean, that doesn't matter.
That doesn't absolutely irrelevant as to the actual nature of the state and what it should or should not be allowed to do.
Human beings should not be allowed to use violence.
That is the key.
Forget about the state.
Forget about politicians.
Forget about this guy or that guy.
They're absolutely irrelevant.
And, you know, the people that we see and interact with at the government level are completely irrelevant to the actual nature of the government.
I mean, this is another thing that I find quite funny about the media and about people's conversations about the government.
That they will say, oh man, George Bush is a terrible guy, or George Bush is a great guy, or do you know that George Bush had a 1% higher score in some subject 25 years ago at university than Kerry did?
And so, you know, everybody thinks Kerry is smarter, but George Bush has actually got higher marks 25 years ago, or 20 years ago.
Or can you believe that George Bush didn't show up for his training when he was at the Texas Air Guard or whatever the hell it was?
Or can you believe that George Bush said this or John Kerry said that?
I just find that stuff to be completely astounding in terms of how people focus on the reality of political power.
If you've ever seen a magician's show, You know, or have the misfortune to have your pocket picked.
They both work the same way.
People create a distraction and then they perform the trick.
So, a magician will wave his hand and get you to look at his hand while the trick is actually occurring in the other hand.
A pickpocket will, you know, say, look, you know, and point at the sky and then take your money.
Or, you know, he'll bump into you or an associate will bump into you and in the scuffle he'll grab your money.
You know, in order for a trick to be performed or for a theft to occur, generally, the first thing that you need is a distraction.
Another funny way of looking at this, at least, there used to be this email flirting around about how a guy would, say, have a car that was stopped and, you know, another guy would say, oh, can I help you?
And the first guy would say, sure.
You know, my battery's dead.
If you could jump start me, that would be great.
And, uh, he would then, uh, you know, chat with the guy.
I'd get the guy's name and say whatever, maybe get his address, um, somehow.
And then, uh, the, uh, he would send in the mail, um, tickets to a show or something saying, hey, thanks for getting my car boosted.
I really need it.
Here's my expression of gratitude.
Go see the show.
And, of course, when the person, uh, went to the show, you know, the guy who had originally pretended his car was broken down or an associate would break into that guy's house while he was knowing he was going to be away at the show, you know, rob him blind.
I mean, this is very, you know, I think an apt metaphor for politics that the first thing they need to do is to get you focused on the wrong thing and then, you know, you won't be able to focus on the fact that you're being robbed blind.
You know, there's an old Thomas Pichon quote, which I'm sure you've heard, which is, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
You know, I mean, Bush.
Who is Bush?
You know, to take an example that people are probably fairly fired up about in general.
Who cares?
You know, he's some rich kid who was an incompetent businessman who doesn't appear particularly bright.
He never wrote any books on political philosophy.
He doesn't speak any foreign languages.
He doesn't know anything about economics.
He's just some kid, right?
He's just some fairly dumb, rich kid, you know, who has an all-American look and, you know, can slowly and vaguely convincingly articulate words that are put up in front of a teleprompter.
The idea of focusing on someone like Bush, of focusing your emotional or intellectual energies on someone like Bush is absolutely ridiculous, in my view.
I mean, I understand it because he's the guy who's held up, and of course he is a fairly easy guy to dislike, but the idea that it's worth spending any time whatsoever on analyzing his character questions or pronouncements is absolutely ridiculous.
And so the amount of coverage that is given to what Bush said or what Bush did, both positive and negative, I just find it ridiculous.
I mean, what can Bush do?
Bush can stand up and make a speech.
Bush can sign a piece of paper.
Well, you know what?
I can stand up and make a speech.
I can sign a piece of paper.
I can sit on my toilet and I can say, I declare war on Paraguay, if I want.
Well, so what?
Nobody listens to me.
It doesn't matter what I do in terms of, you know, I can just say words and sign documents and hand them around and this and that.
That's all George Bush does.
I mean, he may be morally corrupt from an intellectual standpoint, but he's not out there pulling triggers.
You know, Paul Martin in Canada is not the guy who comes over and waves a gun in my face if I don't pay my property taxes.
What the hell do I care about him for?
He's no threat to me whatsoever.
The real government, of course, is all of the people who get the money that is taken from us by force.
It is the military, it's the police, it's the people on welfare, it's the people getting paid for public sector jobs, it's the people on old age pensions, it's all of these people.
And essentially it's the violence that is legitimized to transfer this income at the point of a gun.
That is the government.
The government is the justified use of violence by trade professionals against unarmed civilians.
It's the worst form of bullying outside of the parent-child relationship that you can imagine.
The idea that you're going to focus on George Bush and deal with anything to do with government power is ridiculous.
It's not going to happen.
You know, let's say that there was some citizens' revolt.
Let's say in California they kicked out this brown fellow, er, grey fellow, and they got in Schwarzenegger instead.
Well, what's changed?
Absolutely nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
The system itself is completely resistant to change.
I'll give you a brief example of that.
You know, I'm sort of plowing my way through a book on Clinton because I found it in a second-hand bookstore and I'm unbelievably cheap.
So I'm plowing my way through a book on Clinton.
They're talking about putting in this BTU tax and, you know, a tax on energy, and, you know, it gets diluted to a five cent a liter a gallon tax on gasoline.
And, you know, I mean, some people whose states use a lot of gas or a lot of energy, they were resisting this.
Of course, the more that you resist the president's desire for a new tax, the better off you're going to be.
If you just agree up front as a congressman, oh, sure, I'm for this tax.
Then you're completely off the list in terms of favors that you can get from the White House in return for your vote.
I mean, nobody cares about any more about what you think or say because your vote is bought, you know, or at least it's counted on.
So what?
The best thing you can do...
If you're a congressman, it's to say, my God, I would never vote for this thing in a million years unless you make the following amendments and then you put in all the stuff that's favorable to your constituents and, you know, shaft other people's projects and so on.
And so, you know, the entire system, because it's based on violence and thus is a zero-sum game or a negative-sum game, The entire point of the system is to throw out roadblocks to make sure that any decent decision gets corrupted by a million special interest groups to make sure that the people who are not part of any particularly identified group are the ones who always get screwed.
And with the BTU tax, of course, the moment you start Talking about a tax on energy, the first thing you're going to do is get called on the carpet by the Manufacturers Association of America.
You know, the steel companies are going to be all over you.
The oil and gas companies are going to be all over you.
And they're going to say, look, if you get this tax passed, we are going to run all these negative ads against you.
We're going to support your opponents.
We're going to pay for, you know, Everybody to attack you.
We're going to make sure that reporters are on our side and we're basically going to completely destroy your reputation and make sure you never get re-elected.
So, you don't want that, right?
Because you're a political scum and you're addicted to power.
So, of course, the first thing you're going to do if you want to put a tax on energy is you're going to have to exclude anybody who uses a lot of energy.
Because they're the only people who are going to call you.
You know, I'm not going to launch a big campaign in Washington to oppose a tax that's going to cost me a hundred bucks a year or even a hundred bucks a month.
I don't have the time or energy and nobody's going to listen to me anyway.
Why?
Because I'm just one vote.
So unless I want to go out and get like a hundred thousand people signed up and get them to promise this, that, which is going to take months and months and months, and as you know I've got to earn a living in the meantime, then nobody is going to get that particularly involved in this kind of stuff.
Who is going to get involved in it is those who are going to be using a lot of energy and who have political clout, right?
So manufacturers associations and so on are the people who are going to make sure that they themselves are excluded from the tax.
So you come up with some tax on energy and of course you will only end up taxing people who don't really use any energy.
So, you know, you're going to put this entire program in that was supposed to raise $20 billion, and you're going to end up raising like $4 billion, but you're going to have all of the bureaucratic infrastructure to gather the taxes on larger organizations.
And every time that you try and talk about this tax increase with a congressman, he's going to say that he's absolutely against it unless you make further adjustments, so that then he can go back to his constituents and say, look what I got you.
This is something that Noam Chomsky once pointed out, which I thought was quite funny, about Newt Gingrich.
that Newt Gingrich, you know, and I think it was him who wrote the contract with AmeriCorps, or at least publicized it, and he said, wow, you know, we've really got to go free market, small government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, welfare is bad, and so on.
And, you know, people can say whatever they want, right?
I can say that I'm a turnip or I'm Tina Turner.
I mean, I can say anything that I want.
The real test is in the empirical verification.
And Noam Chomsky, I think quite rightly and humorously pointed out That, you know, if somebody says that they're a rugged individualist and very big on the free market and not so big on welfare, you know, if they're a congressman, it's pretty easy to check whether they believe in this or not.
And the best way to check is to figure out how many grants, loans, subsidies and so on do they get for their home constituency.
And, you know, of course it turns out that Newt Gingrich, as Chomsky put it, was the biggest welfare freak in the country.
He had, like, either the biggest or the second biggest amount of federal money going to his home riding or his home district.
So, of course, the idea that rugged individualism is good is something that's real easy to say, but the real test of the question is, how do you actually act?
You know, what are these verifiable statistics?
That's a yes, rugged individualism is good.
And look, look at the way that I rejected all of these government grants because I want my home constituents to display this rugged individualism that I believe is so valuable.
You know, of course, the question is how long would you last if you decided to no longer get any federal grants or state grants for your local district?
And of course, the answer would be measured in nanoseconds.
You would be tossed out so quickly it would be ridiculous.
I mean, you would never get in.
Unless you had actually made all of these promises to the people who were giving you money to run.
I mean, people say, well, you have a choice in your government, which is also complete nonsense.
The only people that we are ever exposed to on the voting block are people who have already been bought and sold for.
You know, it's like saying, do you want to pay protection money to the Crips or the Mafia or whoever, you know, the Hell's Angels?
I mean, that's not freedom.
You know, choosing your master does not make a slave an independent soul.
I mean, the only people we're ever going to see on the ballot are those who've received an enormous amount of political funding, and those people are only going to receive an enormous amount of political funding from people who are expecting favours in return.
And not just expecting, but, you know, have some hold over them, some threat.
over them in order to create the circumstances that are favorable, right?
I mean, if you're a bombardier in Canada, you're not going to donate to a political party that says, I'm going to get rid of all federal subsidies to, let's say, aerospace industries in Quebec, right?
You're absolutely never going to do that.
In fact, you are going to pay good money to have that person besmirched and smeared because it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year for you and, you know, costs the average Canadian taxpayer like ten bucks a year.
So, I mean, these are just some tiny examples of what is a huge problem which can't be solved with the existence of a government.
It simply cannot be solved, and the reason that it can't be solved is twofold.
One is it's immoral, and two, it's completely illogical and impractical.
You can't have violence that transfers money and power from one group to another without everything descending into civil war and social collapse.
Absolutely impossible.
Violence is either opposed or it is accepted.
If it is opposed, you have to go forth and champion the cause of non-violence at every opportunity and point out the hypocrisy and the greed and the immorality of those who preach violence.
And you have a shot.
If you accept violence, then it's going to spread, it's going to spread, it's going to spread, until it destroys society.
It's absolutely incontrovertible.
No society in history has ever survived the expansion of state power.
It always ends up in the same place, which is a dictatorship.
So the idea that you can sort of nag the government or that you can propose incremental reforms, I mean, as somebody once said, you know, incrementalism in theory is perpetuity in practice, right?
If we say, well, let's do this slowly, bit by bit, it's never going to happen.
The forces that are arrayed against people who want to limit the power of the government, I mean, even if you take outside the significant equation of the fact that the police and the military will shoot the crap out of anybody who disobeys government edicts, Even if you take that out, the motives and forces arrayed against anybody who wants to limit government power is completely impenetrable.
People are elected to fulfill promises.
People are elected to transfer money to their constituents.
People are bribed to be elected in order to pay back the bribes with the public purse.
Anybody who is not presenting difficulties to somebody trying to pass a bill loses out.
So the enormous motive there is to just say, I'm against it, I'm against it, I'm against it.
Then you get lots of attention and concessions.
So you reward people who don't support particular initiatives.
I mean, for these and about a thousand, a thousand other reasons, I mean, it's absolutely funny for me to read stuff about how, you know, the government should do this or should do that.
I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
You are scolding, nagging, or, you know, attempting to change the minds of the mafia by saying, oh, you know, you should be nicer.
You should take people to court rather than shooting them.
It's like, well, if they were...
If they were going to take people to court, they wouldn't be the Mafia.
If the government was interested in rational arguments, then it wouldn't be the government.
Right?
People who are interested in using the power of the gun to force people to do their will are not interested or susceptible to or will respond to a rational argument.
I mean, it's to mistake the nature of political power so completely that you end up being part of the very corruption that you oppose.
If you don't say to a wife beater, it would be nice if you beat your wife a little less.
Maybe you could think about that.
You know, you say to the wife beater, listen, I want to give your wife a recipe.
Can I talk to her for a sec?
And then you just say, look, get the hell out.
Come and live at my place or whatever.
I mean, if you want to get involved, that's what you do.
You don't attempt to reason with people who are addicted to violence and power.
You simply try and get out of them.
So I'm going to have to sign off here because I think housekeeping is here.
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